Diversity & Inclusion Friday news round-up: Sept 21, 2018

Welcome to the latest edition of our Diversity & Inclusion Friday News Round Up. Today we are talking about gender discrimination in Facebook adverts, the latest “Top Companies for Women Technologists” report from AnitaB.org, two students who smuggled a poster into McDonald’s to have better ad diversity and Lyndsey Scott’s reaction to trolls who couldn’t believe she is both a model and a coder. Happy Friday!

Sep 21, 2018

Category

Share

Gender

This week, charges were filed against Facebook and various employers for excluding women from specific job recruitment campaigns. According to US law, employers are not allowed to discriminate based on gender, but the companies decided to show certain adverts to male candidates only. In the past, Facebook was accused of allowing racial and age discriminations with the help of their advertising filters.

Women in STEM

AnitaB.org just released the latest “Top Companies for Women Technologists” report. As part of the program, they evaluated 80 companies and looked at over half a million technologists and found that progress is slow and women remain underrepresented. Interestingly, the report also showed that companies who made gender diversity training mandatory, seem to promote fewer women.

Diversity

When two students in Texas noticed the lack of ad diversity and Asian representation inside their local McDonald’s, they came up with a plan to hang up a poster of themselves. For 51 days, no one at the branch actually noticed, until a tweet about their prank went viral. McDonald’s has in the meantime removed the poster but promised to include them in future marketing campaigns.

Women in STEM

“Models are dumb, software developers are ugly.” Some people really seem to believe these stereotypes: when a tech account posted a picture of software developer and former Victoria’s Secret model Lyndsey Scott on Instagram, people commented thatshe couldn’t be a “real” coder. Lyndsey then decided to respond to the trolls and shared her (very impressive) achievements.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

Caroline Berns is the Head of Talent Acquisition for Ericsson Middle East & Africa. Born in Germany, she lived in the US and various countries in Europe until 2012, when she moved to South Africa.

RELATED CONTENT

The Ericsson blog

In a world that is increasingly complex, we are on a quest for easy. At the Ericsson blog, we provide insight, news and opinion to help make complex ideas on technology, business and innovation simple. If you want to hear from us directly, please head over to our contact page.